#chisel marks

Two couples of stone disks found at the entrances and cemeteries of Protohistoric hill forts in the north-eastern Adriatic area were suggested to have a symbolic meaning representing the Sun and the Night Sky (Bernardini et al. 2022).

In one pair the night sky is symbolically represented by a number of natural holes made by marine bivalves but in the other stone studied here the marks are made by a human hand and show a pattern. We performed a statistical comparison of the chisel marks with the most common asterisms to try to establish if they were randomly made or they had some intentionality. We have found that:

The whole pattern is composed by 29 chisel marks, 24 in the front face of the stone and 5 on the back. 28 chisel marks are consistent with the asterisms of Scorpius, Orion, Pleiades and, perhaps, of Cassiopeia on the back side of the stone. The correlation between the chisel marks and the stellar position is very high